Neither money, property nor prestige will follow you to the afterlife,
but you can take riches in the form of love, says Chris Tong in Transcending
Life and Death in God. His spirituality series for MightyWords continues
with this essay on connecting with God to get honest about your life
and death.

Spirituality
EditorFatbrain

You
CAN'T Take It With You:Transcending
Life and Death in God, Part 1

Most people
who haven't had a death of someone very close to them don't realize
that it never goes away. They talk about nonsensical things like
"closure" and "healing", but what people are
coming to realize is that when someone close to you dies, one of
the stars you steer by falls from the firmament. If 9/11 has taught
us anything, it is about the continuity of loss, and how things
are always different after death.

Does your life
have a purpose? If so, is it one that isn't going to get instantly
ripped off when you die? Many of us spend our lives denying death,
allowing ourselves to be completely consumed and distracted by our
responsibilities, our indulgences, and our search for things we cannot
take with us after death in any overt form (knowledge, accomplishment,
fame, or friendship). But death is still coming. We get little support
from culture, society, biology, or even conventional religion for
becoming adequately prepared; indeed, we are actively discouraged
from even considering the matter. In Western society, the “dying business”
at best tends to help us come to the point of acceptance of death
(which already should be true for us right now). And the “death
business” tends to assist the living go on living rather than assist
the dead in their transition, as more informed cultures do. This book
sensitizes us to our mortality, and encourages us to start preparing
now (see the next
book for Part 2).

The
ultimate key to freedom and happiness in life, in death, and beyond
death, is not a matter of manipulating mind, body, or spirit; such
techniques have limited potential by themselves. Instead, the ultimate
key is based on linking up with the Divine Reality which is always
present, and which transcends life and death, and, through that
connection, allowing the Divine Reality Itself to set us free (Figure
1).

FIGURE
1

Perfect Happiness
is not about changing ourselves or our situation. It is about Awakening
altogether from the dream of being a separate, limited self — who
is living, who is dying, who is suffering, who is stuck on the wheel
of re-birth. We can make all kinds of improvements while we are asleep,
to our dream character or our dream circumstance, but none of those
changes in the dream represents the same radical freedom as does Waking
Up from the dream. The great revelation of Enlightenment is that,
in Reality, there are no separate selves; there is only One Being,
the Divine Being. Divine Enlightment is to Wake Up out of the dream
of mortality as the One Divine Being, in Whose Consciouness
the realms of life and death are being dreamed spontaneously.